At the start of the story, Mickey is obsessed with Gemma, an Insta influencer who seems to have everything Mickey wants, and Mickey’s willing to do anything to have that life, too. Well, sometimes she’s capable of calculation and manipulation, sometimes she just kinda drifts along into extreme messes. I don’t think a protagonist always needs to be likable for the book to be likable, but I need to understand some of their decisions, (and they need to make decisions, not just be present for other people’s actions) and I need to care about the outcome.
Look, I like obsession stories and unreliable narrators and twisted friendships, but this novel just wasn’t sure where it was going with any of this. Parts of it were an unsolved murder, while other parts were kind of a social media manifesto, and a little was the promised Insta obsession story. There’s also a weirdly glaring plothole that ruins the central mystery. Sure, we have an unreliable narrator with questionable mental health, but there’s a very simple way to determine if something was real or imaginary — Is this whole social media drama taking place in a world without Google?!?
Also, there are some really hilarious NYC book world moments. Rosemary gushes that booksellers like Naomi are the gatekeepers to literature, which I’m pretty sure I’ve heard publisher’s assistants say to book store staff at book launches. Plus, there’s a lot of rich New Yorker soul searching from Naomi about whether she’s really hungry enough to create great art, and comments on how writing is her first love, before any personal relationship, all of which I feel like I could have overheard at loads of Brooklyn bars. I loved how Caleb was sort of a generic nice guy, and then the boyfriend in Naomi’s “fiction” manuscript is kind of an underdeveloped, generic nice guy, and I just giggled so much in the middle of the creepy obsession story.
Readers will be dragged into Naomi’s terrible decisions, so I don’t want to reveal anything about how the plot unfolds. But I do have to say that I didn’t predict the way the story would end up. In fact, for most of the book, I thought Naomi’s weird stalking and fake friendship would all be undone by Caleb and Rosemary being reasonably well-adjusted people, and the whole mess coming out in a casual chat.
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